Hyderabad firm at centre of CBSE marking row had messed up 2019 Inter results

When Intermediate results were declared on April 18, 2019, widespread errors were reported across Telangana.

Hyderabad: A Hyderabad-based company at the centre of a controversy over the Central Board of Secondary Education’s digital answer sheet processing system had earlier faced a scathing government inquiry following a results disaster that affected lakhs of students in Telangana in 2019.

Over 18.5 lakh students registered under CBSE had their answer sheets processed under a new digital marking system this year, following which errors were reported in the results.

The company handling the project, Coempt EduTeck, was previously known as Globarena Technologies. 

In 2019, Globarena Technologies had secured a Rs 4.35-crore contract from the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE) to manage digital processing of results for 8.7 lakh students.

Coempt EduTeck is headed by VSN Raju, who holds the position of director and chief executive officer of the firm. Its website claims it is the “leading EdTech company with over 25 years of progressive experience in providing end-to-end examination solutions to certificate awarding bodies.” 

2019 Telangana disaster

When TSBIE results were declared on April 18, 2019, widespread errors were reported. In 531 cases, Geography students found practical marks missing from mark memos. In 496 cases, the code “AP” appeared in place of marks. For 4,288 students from the Mathematics, Economics and Commerce (MEC) stream, mathematics marks appeared as single-digit figures. 

As many as 23 students died by suicide across Telangana in the days following the result declaration.

The Telangana government appointed a three-member expert committee to examine the failures. The panel comprised GT Venkateshwar Rao, then Managing Director of Telangana State Technology Services, Professor A Vasan, now Dean of Administration at BITS Hyderabad, and Professor Nishanth Dongari of IIT Hyderabad. Its report, submitted on April 26, 2019, found “systemic failures, procedural collapse, and glaring negligence” on the part of both the company and the board.

The committee found that Globarena did not meet the minimum work-experience criteria required for the project, and that no formal agreement had been signed between the board and the company, with the entire operation being conducted on the basis of a work order alone.

The software had been showing faults since October 2018, nearly six months before results were declared. TSBIE had flagged deficiencies in multiple modules, but the company’s response was found to be unsatisfactory. Results were declared without adequate testing, mock runs or benchmarking against previous years’ data, which the committee described as “the biggest mistake in the entire process.” 

The board’s own Electronic Data Processing monitoring team had been sent back to their parent departments in June 2018, leaving the software development process unmonitored.

Syed Omer Jaleel, who took charge as TSBIE Commissioner after the disaster, told the Times of India that the software was never properly tested and that the firm had secured the project with no backup and no technical support.

Despite the inquiry findings, Globarena Technologies was never formally blacklisted. The company subsequently rebranded as Coempt EduTeck and went on to secure digital examination contracts, including one with the Council of Higher Secondary Education in Odisha, before winning the CBSE contract.

Three tenders, progressively relaxed criteria

CBSE floated three successive tenders for its on-screen marking (OSM) system before finding a qualified vendor, according to a report by Hindustan Times. A senior board official confirmed the sequence, stating that the board had wanted to roll out the OSM system in 2026, but failed to secure a bidder in the first two rounds. 

The first tender was scrapped in accordance with the General Financial Rules of the Government of India. The second tender, issued in May 2025, was cancelled after all four bidders – including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Coempt – failed technical evaluation. 

A third tender was then issued in August 2025, at which point only six months remained before the system was to be deployed nationally for Class 12 board examinations.

CBSE officials told HT that there were shortcomings and operational issues in the initial Request for Proposal (RFP) documents, which triggered the tender revisions. They said that gaps were addressed in the third RFP to make the process more practical and ensure successful participation. 

Between the failed tenders and the August RFP that produced a winner, several technical requirements were substantially diluted. Internal committee minutes dated November 19, 2025, reviewed by HT, showed that both TCS and Coempt cleared the technical round in the third tender, with Coempt emerging as the successful bidder after financial evaluation as the lowest financial bidder under the quality-cum-cost based selection framework.

The minimum scanning resolution was reduced from “300 DPI and above” to “minimum 200 DPI with clearly readable content.” TCS had, during pre-bid consultations in May, urged CBSE to lower the DPI threshold, arguing that 150 DPI would provide adequate clarity while reducing file size and retrieval time. CBSE did not act on the suggestion in May but adopted the relaxed standard in August. 

The August tender also removed the explicit requirement for robotic scanning infrastructure and broadly required only that the service provider supply “scanners” as part of the IT infrastructure.

The mandatory Capability Maturity Model Integration certification – an internationally recognised measure of software process maturity – was lowered from Level 5, the highest tier, to Level 3, widening the pool of eligible bidders in the final RFP.

The financial threshold was set at an average annual turnover of Rs 50 crore from digital examination services over three years, a figure Coempt cleared by just Rs 86 lakh, with a three-year average of Rs 50.86 crore. TCS cleared it by thousands of crores, while rival bidder Rankguru Technology Solutions had a three-year average of Rs 117.56 crore.

While scanning-quality requirements were relaxed, the August tender simultaneously imposed significantly harsher penalties for operational delays. The February tender had prescribed Rs 20,000 per wrongly or partially scanned copy and Rs 50,000 for unscanned books, with delays attracting 6 per cent per day capped at 30 per cent. 

The August tender substantially reduced per-copy error penalties to Rs 4,000 per mismatched copy, Rs 8,000 for partial scans and Rs 15,000 for unscanned books, but introduced operational deadline-based penalties, with failure to scan the previous day’s answer books by the following day attracted Rs 50,000 per working day and delays in going live attracted Rs 10 lakh per week.

A clause in the earlier tender that explicitly disqualified bidders with a history of poor performance or those “blacklisted earlier by the board or debarred by any government organisation” was modified in the revised tender to disqualify only those “currently blacklisted.” Since Globarena had never been formally blacklisted and had since rebranded, neither condition applied to Coempt.

Other changes between the earlier and final tender included the cooling-off period during which engaging former board officials constitutes a corrupt practice was reduced from two years to one, the requirement for bidders to own their data centres was removed, the requirement to own or have rights to the complete source code of the software was deleted and a corrigendum issued just before the bid submission deadline removed the board’s right to blacklist the firm in the event of future failures.